Covid response

On January 1st 175,000 people left Wuhan and air travel to other Chinese cities was restricted but not travel around the world. The first case of Covid hit the US on January 20th and on January 29th the White House task force on Covid was started. Two days later all air travel from China was restricted. It was then discovered that the personal protection equipment(PPE) supply was is short supply. There was supposed to be an emergency supply but it was depleted from past flu epidemics and not replaced. In addition over the years more and more of this equipment was made in China and they had hoarded the supply in anticipation of the problem while they maintained that the Covid was not spread from human to human. The government then got US companies to begin making PPE. Over the next few months congress approved $6 trillion dollars to offset the economic and health effects of Covid. During this time a number of US companies began the search for a vaccine and for other prophylactic medicines. Meanwhile in mid April the economy was closed except for front line workers, truckers and food stores. The CDC estimated that if the US did not take action that 1.6 to 2.1 million people would die. By September 200,000 had died and Biden said on September 17th that if Trump had done his job no American would have died from this virus. The major failure in the government response was that no one including medical experts stressed the importance of protecting the elderly. In all past flu epidemics it was the elderly that got hurt the most so this should not have been a surprise to anyone. It was so lost in the weeds that in NYC infected people were being sent to nursing homes even though there was a hospital ship sitting empty waiting for Covid patients.